14 Wednesday Nov 2012
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… I was so pleased with how the tea towels I made last week turned out (even though they were a bit small), I decided to make another set. I had more linen, plenty of paint, a fresh carrot, another ikea pencil and a free evening.
… seams sewn, tea towels ironed, grid drawn, dots painted, carrot whittled, triangles painted, paint left to dry, pattern ironed (for exactly 5 minutes), tea towels washed and ironed and ready to use…
… soon in a kitchen near here!
10 Saturday Nov 2012
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… or maybe a pencil instead of a stick. There are so many fabulous ideas for crafty wonderful things you can do and make, some days I wonder if I will ever have time to work again, even now I keep running out of time, not able to do all the things I want, to make all the things I imagine, to use up all the supplies I keep buying…
… I have always loved material, fabric, cloth. I spent hours craving one piece or another from my mother’s stash as a child – I was finally given a particularly special piece in my early 20’s, I hold onto the dress I made with it, I am not sure I could get into it any more even if I did still wear dresses! I can spend hours in fabric shops, running my hand over the rolls of fabric, dreaming up projects as I drift onto the next roll and the next…
… the internet opens up a whole new world, new temptations, new ideas, places where you can get your own designs printed on material, and people painting and screen printing all sorts of incredibleness…
… I decided I wanted to be part of this. A length of linen bought, washed, ironed, cut and sewn into tea towels. A word of warning – some people out there are selling you tiny tea towels! For some lazy reason I decided to use measurements from some of my favourite listings on etsy, rather than walk all the way to the kitchen to measure my own towels. They ended up smaller than I expected!
… two blank canvases, three bottles of paint, a million ideas, a grid drawn onto the linen in chalk, and now for a repeating pattern… first the dots, something small, round, disposable… what else but the ikea pencil. Then the triangles, triangles are all the fashion, but I wanted them to be small… I remembered this amazing blog post, where a wall was painted with a potato… a look in the fridge, no potatoes, but carrots – perfect. I whittled my best triangle from half a carrot and was all set.
Repeating rows, fading into nothingness, different heights, vaguely inspired by this painting. The finishing touch… a random dot with the triangles and a triangle in the dots. Left to dry overnight, then ironed and ironed and ironed to set the paint. Another spin in the washer to check they were colour-fast and to wash away the chalk, and now they are wrapped and ready to go, a present for someone special.
grt*escp 